The invention generally relates to clothes dryers, and more particularly relates to door assemblies for clothes dryers and a method for reversing the side from which a door assembly opens.
As is well known, a domestic clothes dryer typically has a cabinet including a front panel with an access opening through which clothes are loaded and unloaded. Generally, a door mounts with hinges to the cabinet front panel on one side of the access opening.
There are many laundry areas where the loading of clothes into a dryer is inhibited because the door is hinged on one particular side. For example, in many installations, the location of the washing machine relative to the dryer is fixed by pre-existing plumbing and/or dryer vent holes. However, if the dryer door is hinged on the side of the washer, it is inconvenient to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer because the clothes have to be passed over or in front of the open dryer door. Also, in an upstairs installation such as in a closet or alcove, a folding door or other permanent fixture may prevent or encumber the opening of a dryer door from one side or the other. Thus, it would be desirable to have a dryer door that could be reversed so that it could readily be hung or mounted from either side of the access opening depending on the requirements of the particular installation. Further, it may be desirable for a manufacturer to be able to easily reverse the mounting side to provide product differentiation between models.
Many commercially available refrigerators have doors that can be hung from either side. In the typical reversing process, the hinges are relocated from one side to the other, and the door handles and trim are mounted to the side edge of the door using screws so that they can also be readily relocated. Such method, however, is not generally applicable to clothes dryers. First, many dryers have a recessed door handle that can't be disconnected from one side and then relocated to the other side. Also, if the door handle is mounted with screws to the face of the door, relocating it from one side to the other would leave screw holes that would have an undesirable appearance even if filled with plugs. Further, a dryer door typically fits into a recess in the cabinet front panel, so there generally is no space available at the side of the door for mounting a handle.
Another possible method of reversing the door mounting would be to remove the hinges from the cabinet front panel, invert the door so that the right is on the left and the left is on the right, and then reattach the hinges on the opposite side of the dryer cabinet. This method would have a drawback, however, because most dryer doors are not symmetrical. More specifically, in the typical arrangement, the door is an assembly including an outer panel and an inner liner which are spaced at the bottom to provide a lower internal chamber through which air is exhausted from the clothes drum. That is, the lower portion of the inner liner has perforations that face the clothes drum and an aperture formed on the underside of the chamber. Thus, the perforations, chamber, and bottom aperture provide a passageway for air to be drawn from the clothes drum through the door and into a lint filter that is disposed in the access opening below the door. The advantage of having a non-symmetric door with a relatively thin top portion is that there is more clothes volume with the dryer. If such a door were inverted to reverse the hinges and handle, the chamber would be at the top. Further, even if the door had the same thickness all the way up (i.e. geometrically symmetrical), inverting the door would position the perforations and the aperture at the top.